


The Earliest Spell Lord

by blasted0glass



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Magic, Science Experiments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:14:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27091870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blasted0glass/pseuds/blasted0glass
Summary: Magic becomes real overnight. Who can best navigate the consequences?
Kudos: 8





	The Earliest Spell Lord

Brianna cast a spell on me, almost from the moment I met her.

I had been walking in the park. I was on my way to class during my first semester of college. The park was the city’s, rather than the college’s, but it was across the street from the campus. Children played a game of tag while students milled about. To me, it seemed like the air itself was waiting in anticipation for a bright future. I felt anticipation myself--I had been far too early for class, so I was killing time.

I had killed about enough. When I crossed the street and started walking to class I lost myself in thoughts about the material we would cover. It was only the third class session, and I expected to get to the really interesting things that very day.

Brianna tapped my shoulder and knocked me out of my reverie.

The first thing she did was ask me for directions. At the time I kind of resented it, but I assure you that’s not a typical reaction for me. Normally I’m all about helping others. In fact I make a point of helping people whenever I am able. I’m altruistically-minded.

Directions are the easiest thing I can do for someone--it’s like the lowest-hanging fruit of altruism. Just by virtue of having lived somewhere I have inordinate power to help with the problem of being lost? Not that I, a freshman, was particularly familiar with this area.

But what a simple thing, directions are! Of course, navigation software means that fewer people need directions anymore. Only the old, or the hurried, or the inconsiderate. At that time I suspected that Brianna was the last of those three. In the split-second evaluation we all make when meeting someone new, it made me want to help her less-- _I_ had no trouble reading a campus map, so why should she get special treatment? Who was this lady?

She was gorgeous: athletic, slim, dark hair. She wore makeup so naturally I barely noticed it. Her dark clothes were plain but suited her extremely well. On top of that she walked at a sedate pace to match my own--so not old, and not hurried. Did she think she had the right to make demands of me? Her voice was melodious without even trying.

“Do you know where the Wagner building is?” she asked. I felt my face redden. It was morally wrong to refuse to help someone because they were extraordinarily pretty... right? Just as wrong as it would be to refuse to help an ugly person? While my brain tripped, force of habit took over.

“It’s over there, ah, on the other side of the building with the green roof.” Straight ahead of us, about two hundred yards away, I tried to say, but the words got caught in my mouth.

“Thanks,” she said, giving me a sideways glance. She smiled. I tried to smile back. “I’ve got a class there in about fifteen minutes.”

“What a coincidence,” I said, still on autopilot. “I do as well.”

“‘Human Behavior and the Social Environment’?”

“Yes, actually.” I hadn’t seen her there in the earlier sessions, but then, there were over a hundred students.

“Well then! Shall we go there together?”

“No chance you’ll get lost, then.” She laughed--and I couldn’t help but notice her laugh was as pretty as the rest of her.

That was how Brianna introduced herself to me.

\---

“Why social work?” I asked her.

We were waiting for our second class to start. I’d been surprised to find we both wanted to be social workers. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given the class we shared, but my snap judgement of her character had misled me. I’d assumed she was there to fill some general requirements--not because she actually wanted to help others, or that she could want a career in helping others.

I was happy to be wrong, but asking her motivations risked stepping on a landmine. What if her reasons were depressing? I knew mine were. Even so, if you don’t risk offending people, you cannot get to know them. I was finding that the more I learned about Brianna, the more I wanted to learn.

“I want to make a difference for the better,” she said. “I asked myself what my talents were, and how they might best help humanity. I have to admit I’m not very mathematically minded, or charismatic, or anything else that helps you make a big difference.”

“Are you sure?” I said. She seemed charismatic to me.

“Well, I think directly fighting for the helpless is what I should do, and is about the best I can do.”

“‘About the best you can do’ is a funny way of saying that. I think it’s a very important thing to be doing.”

Perhaps Brianna was more considerate than I, because she didn’t then ask about my own motivation for choosing social work. I had a prepared answer about how I wanted to defy my father’s favorite saying about the unfairness of the world--which was kind of close to the truth--but I didn’t end up needing it. What she said instead threw me for a loop.

“What do you think is the most pressing problem for humanity?”

“Hmmm.” I hadn’t thought about it, at least not deeply. “Climate change, I guess.”

“I’ve thought about that one. I think scientists, engineers, and politicians are the best able to do something about that--and I wouldn’t be any good at being one of those. But do you think you could do anything about it?”

“Er, well… no, I don’t think so.”

“Have you considered it deeply? It’s the biggest concern for humanity, right?”

“Well, I’m not an expert on climate change. Even knowing what should be done would take a heck of a lot of research.”

“But how do you know that? Have you done any research?” I felt myself getting frustrated. I tried to think of her offending me as just the process of her getting to know me.

“No, but I can tell that it’s complicated. People fight about it all the time--if it were easy there’d be no fighting.”

“Ah, yes. Like laws against murder.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, people don’t argue about legalizing murder. It’s obviously bad--so there’s no disagreement about whether it should be disallowed, in general. Only difficult things make people acrimonious.”

“That’s true,” I said. “And it makes sense that the biggest problems for humanity aren’t things that are easy to solve. Or else they wouldn’t be problems in the first place.”

“Exactly!” she said. “Well, kind of. The problem of murder hasn’t been solved, either.”

“Not perfectly, but it kind of has been.

“Apparently murder rates been falling for like three decades.” She waved her hand. “But murder is still possible, and will be for a long time. And for humanity as a whole, climate change is the more pressing issue. Somebody needs to solve climate change sooner rather than later, even if it is difficult.”

“There are many people working on climate change.”

“True. Did you ever consider that you could contribute, on the margin?” Her tone was curious rather than accusatory.

“Oh, I’m sure I could in some way,” I said. “But saying ‘somebody needs to solve climate change’ is a little bit misleading, isn’t it? Climate change isn’t a dragon you can slay. It’s going to be solved by hundreds of people making small strides, or not at all.”

“That’s something I like about you,” she said. I felt my heart skip a beat. It didn’t make sense--she hardly knew me, what good was her approval?--but even so. I couldn’t help but smile. “You know that the real heroes aren’t necessarily in the limelight.”

“Thank you. I try to be realistic about it.”

“Here’s a question, though; suppose a threat to humanity suddenly appeared out of nowhere. A deadly, difficult-to-understand, complex threat that would kill everyone in just a few months unless a complicated solution was implemented. Do you think we’d be able to do anything about it?”

“I hope so,” I said. “Depends. Without any warning, it would be hard--but then again, it might be easier than you’d think. A clear, immediate threat is much easier to coordinate around. Right?”

“Hmm.”

“It’s the slow ones that get you.”

Her smile was a bit sad. “What if it was just a week, or a day?”

“Well… it still depends. What is the solution to the threat?”

“I don’t know. What if it requires global coordination of every human?”

“Doesn’t matter how long, then. We’d be toast.”

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s too big of an ask for any problem. Not everyone can coordinate.”

“I think that’s why we like to imagine solitary heroes, or at most small groups of heroes. It’s a lot simpler.”

“Even if it isn’t the truth. So no coordinating all humans, then. But most humans, with the others being forced to follow the rules?”

“Again, depends too much on the specifics.”

“Okay, why don’t we imagine it around murder, then,” she said. “We can use it as a hypothetical. Suppose that, I don’t know, one million deliberate homicides from now humanity is going to mysteriously go extinct. How do you stop homicides from occurring?”

“Hmmm,” I said. “How long does that give us?”

“Less than three years,” she said.”I was reading about it on Wikipedia. There are almost 400k per year.”

“That’s a lot! I thought you said the murder rate had fallen!”

“It has, here at least. Most of those are in developing or war-torn countries.”

“Ah.”

“It might be falling in those places as well,” she said. “In any case, how to stop murder in its tracks?”

“Well, you should start by explaining to everyone that murder is dangerous and needs to be absolutely banned. Convince them with whatever convinced you.”

“Okay, so I explain that one nuke hitting a city causes everyone to instantly drop dead?” She gave me a look. “Some dictator might be tempted to take hostages.”

“That’s a good point. Alright… so maybe you need to be secretive. Hmm. Explain it to a few very powerful, trustworthy people? Try to make a campaign against murder… but no matter how well you do it, humanity has a deadline, doesn’t it?”

“Two deadlines,” she said. “Eventually the number of murders will be passed, and eventually the secret will get out. Even if you get the murder rate very close to zero, the possiblity of hostages won’t truly go away.”

“Ironically, a lower population makes the first part more tractable. Less murders per year, I mean. You just have to get there without murder.”

“Ha ha.” She did not look amused.

“Maybe make birth control widely available? Increase standard of living? Maybe if things get good enough, nobody will want hostages… and then you can reveal the secret?”

“I don’t think deliberately lowering population is a realistic goal. Especially since it would have to keep happening after our deaths--we’d have to set something up for the long haul.”

“You’re right. I’m not sure it’s possible. Even if everyone knew and was otherwise happy… over the vast expanse of time the number of murders will stack up and pass the limit. There’s always going to be the odd person that commits a murder.”

“That’s pretty grim.” Her face matched the words.

“I suppose I’d at least _try_ to stop it. Huh,” I said, as I was struck by an idea. “I’d also look for a way to increase the limit. Make it so that a low murder rate is acceptable.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “Oh well. I guess we’d best keep our thoughts concerned with real problems.”

\---

It seemed like every conversation with Brianna changed something about how I saw the world. She’d bring up all kinds of crazy things; cryogenic preservation, quirks of linguistics, even a weird mathematical currency called Bitcoin. She once spent twenty minutes talking to me about combinatorics. It seemed like she knew everything. I found myself content to listen, only interrupting to ask questions.

Sometimes I felt like she was deliberately teaching me everything she found interesting, as though I were the student and she were worldly and wise. It didn’t bother me. When I learned her birthday I discovered she was the younger of the two of us, but it was a fact I often forgot. I wondered why she liked talking to me so much.

At any rate, we became fast friends.

It occurred to me that a beautiful woman might not be used to people _genuinely listening_ to what she had to say, so maybe Brianna was simply pouring out interests to anyone who would give her the time. Even so, I liked to think I was special.

One day she talked to me about startups and founders.

“But what makes a good founder?” she asked. I resisted the temptation to answer without thinking about it.

“Well… they have to be hard working.”

“Of course.”

“And good at selling their ideas. Good at getting people to do what they want.”

“How can you be good at that?”

“I mean, you have to be convincing, and persuasive…” I didn’t see where she was trying to go with it. That’s something I had learned about her--Brianna had this tone in her voice when she brought up a topic that was going somewhere. I was familiar with it, because she was almost always working toward a point.

“‘Convincing’ and ‘persuasive’ mean the same thing. But how could I _go out_ and _be a successful founder_?” There was a challenge in her voice, and I wanted to rise to the challenge.

“First, you’ve got to have a good idea,” I said as I started to keep count on my fingers. “Good ideas are inherently persuasive. Second, you’ve got to be able to describe it clearly--mechanistically. Dissect it and show how all the little pieces come together to make it work, so that it is convincing. Third, you need to do things to get others excited about the idea… like, talk enthusiastically, but also tell them what’s in it for _them_.”

“Describe how it improves their lives, or _somebody’s_ lives at least,” she said. Her smile told me I was getting closer to the point.

“Exactly. Fourth, you need to know your audience so you can speak to them, that is, their knowledge and their viewpoints.” I needed to come up with one more thing so that I could use every finger on my hand--a completely arbitrary thing, but still. It felt necessary. She’d been looking at my hands, but our eyes briefly met. An idea came to me. “Finally, you’ve got to appear trustworthy. Dressing nice, seeming knowledgeable… being attractive.” I was extremely gratified to see her blush. She knew I was talking about her.

“A founder needs more than those things,” she said. “But yes, being hard working and persuasive will help a founder. What else do they need to succeed? In general?” Apparently I hadn’t gotten the point, yet.

“Intelligence.”

“That helps with everything.”

“Fair. Uh… persistent. Maybe even delusional about their idea.” She frowned, but she didn’t contradict me. “They need to be lucky, as well--to come up with something that everyone else missed in the first place.” _Luck is also helpful when you’re trying to be gorgeous,_ I didn’t say.

“I think you’re missing two things,” she said.

“Which are?”

“First, they also need to be _fast._ They need first-mover advantage, and if they come up with a good idea then they should jump on it. Good ideas can go away. I’d call that decisiveness, or maybe compulsive impatience.”

“Ah, yeah, I can see that. Sounds like Steve Jobs.”

“Or Elon Musk.”

“Who?”

“Ah, nevermind. But there is one final thing. I’m surprised you haven’t thought about it already. I’ve been considering it a lot, after my last conversation with you.”

“Okay, so just go on and tell me what it is?”

“Founders need help.”

“Help?”

“Yeah. The idea that a founder does things by themselves is an illusion. Nobody can do everything themselves--so a good founder, a _successful_ founder, will have co-founders and confidants and friends.” This time I found myself frowning.

“So, they’ll be socially capable.”

“It’s not really that… I mean, that helps, just like intelligence helps. But sometimes a group of people can come together by accident. In fact, I’d say much of success is an accident.”

“Luck you mean.” Our thoughts were aligned.

“Yeah,” she said. “Luck.”

“But it’s also continuing to try until things happen to work. Determination.”

“That’s true, though I don’t think most people appreciate how bad their chances really are. So maybe being delusional helps in most cases... and that’s not something you can do on purpose. But as you said yourself, no endeavor is solved alone. That’s especially true for founders.”

“So the next question would be, how do you find the help you need?”

She shrugged, but her smile didn’t disappear. “Keep your eyes open, I guess.”

\---

That very same day was the day that Brianna discovered magic. She didn’t tell me about it until the day after, since she’d found it late into the night while surfing the internet.

Brianna told me about a forum she’d found with magic spells on it. She dragged me to a computer in the library and brought up the site. I sat down to look and my curiosity started turning to confusion.

“Spelling Forum?” I asked. “Really?”

“You should just read it.”

It was low-quality, freeware stuff--some person’s hobby. There was a stylized outline of a witch for the site’s banner and not a lot else. The website didn’t even have ads.

Why the heck would she show me this?

“So, it’s like an RP forum,” I said. That was a charitable interpretation. It seemed to me that it was some stereotypical Wiccan woo; just the kind you might find buried on the internet.

“No, the spells absolutely work. I tried one.”

“You _tried_ it?”

“Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t cost much to try. Just meditate on the words for a while and the spell will start to work.” 

She grabbed the mouse from me and brought up one of the posts on the site. It was a list of basic spells. They were named--the spell for Walking Fast, the spell for Finding North, and the spell for Hearing Well. Each had a handful of random English words next to them on the page.

The website explained that meditating on the meaning of the words, together, would lead to the spell taking effect. It stated that the first few casts would be difficult, but with practice the spells would happen easily and automatically. To me, the most surprising part of the explanation was that it had good grammar.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “This is so obviously fake it kind of hurts to read.”

“I thought that at first, too. But it worked!”

“This looks like, oh, what’s it called. The observer-expectancy effect.”

“You mean confirmation bias? There’s no difference between experimenter and participant, here.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant. You think about the spell, and expect to walk faster--so of course you’ll walk faster.”

“It’s more than that,” she said from over my shoulder. I was re-reading the list of spells.

“And what’s with these words? None of these have anything to do with walking fast.”

“Yeah, they are kind of random. I don’t know why it’s these and not others.”

I clicked around the site a bit. The mouse got stuck so I smacked it against the table. The computers in the library were old.

There wasn’t much else on the forum. 

“What do you think?” she asked.

“How can you be sure that the spell actually did anything?”

“You can feel it. Here, just do the spell for Finding North. It’s the one I did first.”

“How long does this take?”

“An hour.”

“An hour! You want me to waste a freaking _hour_ trying to cast spells on a Tuesday night? I have math class tomorrow.”

“Oh come on, an hour’s not that long. It might take less time than that, even.”

“This is…”

“Please?” I turned to face her; she was leaning toward the monitor, much closer than I had realized. I could smell her hair. She stood up. “Look, I know it seems crazy, but trust me. This works.”

\---

It didn’t end up taking an hour--more like twenty minutes.

Most of that time was spent trying to get over the feeling of stupidity for trying to cast spells. After that, I meditated on the words one after another. _Humorer, gemel, vivid_. Brianna had to define gemel for me--it meant one of a pair, or perhaps hinge. I couldn’t imagine what it had to do with finding one’s directions.

 _Humorer, gemel, vivid_. _Humorer--gemel--vivid_. The words flowed together, strangely melodious. It wasn’t too hard to keep up. I repeated them over and over. They lost their meaning in my mind, then they started to blur together into one Word.

When the spell took effect it shocked me out of my reverie. It was a slight tugging sensation, like a spider web across my face, or maybe the impulse to turn toward the presence of someone in the room. It pulled me toward the north, or at least it felt that way.

Of course I didn’t _believe_ it. It was just a feeling--I needed to test it.

My roommate was out, so I put my computer chair in the middle of the room. I sat down for a moment, then I stood up and walked to the wall. There were sticky notes on my desk, so I grabbed one and put it on the wall in the direction that felt like north. The door to my dorm room opened toward the east, but the spell made me think it was slightly offset--more like east by northeast.

I sat back in the chair and rolled it to the left a bit to line things up. Then I spun with my eyes closed. The whirring made me dizzy and a little nauseated, but the tugging sensation twisted around me. It was unmistakable, winding itself around my head. I didn’t forget which way was north. After my spinning came to a stop, I stood and lifted a trembling arm. When I opened my eyes I was pointing at the sticky note.

I texted Brianna. She responded at once, so I followed the strange sensation down the hall and out to meet her. It faded before I got to the library.

\---

“The others work as well,” she said. We sat in front of the same computer as earlier that day. The library was open late, even this early in the semester. Brianna was there and looking through a book.

“You tested them?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t recommend learning them all yourself, though,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It seems to get harder with each spell--both I and another person on the forum noticed that. We did our spells in a different order, but it seemed to both of us that the later spells took longer to cast the first time. Almost two hours, though it always gets shorter with practice.”

“Thanks for letting me know. Although, if there are only four spells, it hardly matters.”

“Oh, you must not have seen,” she said, still leafing through the book she was holding. “There’s a fifth spell that someone just discovered.”

“Discovered?” I asked, taken aback. “How?”

“They guessed a combination of words, is the best I can figure. And the people on the forum are trying to discover more,” she said.

“How many?”

“People? Only like ten, at least those that comment. But you can see why it might be worth waiting to learn more spells--later ones might be more useful, and you might want to learn them quickly.”

“Where did the spells come from, anyway?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea. It doesn’t say, and the site is only a few days old.”

“We should copy the whole thing in case it gets taken down.” It seemed like the existence of spells would be hard to keep secret. Perhaps someone--though I couldn’t imagine who--was suppressing the information. There had to be a reason that it was only becoming available _now_ , and it was unlikely the spells just happened to start working overnight.

“Good idea,” Brianna said. “I’m keeping close tabs on it in case any more are discovered.”

“How are they going about it?”

“Dictionary attacks,” she said, laughing at a personal joke. “Seriously, though, they are picking combinations of words from the dictionary and seeing if they are spells.”

“Ah, so that’s the book you are holding.”

“Yeah. Though it doesn’t seem like searching randomly would be very effective…” she said. She snapped the book shut.

“Of course not. There’s so many combinations of words, you’d never expect to chance on a spell by accident. Call it a hundred thousand words, then it’s the factorial of that...” I felt a note of confusion. “There are _way, way_ too many possible spell combinations. And you say someone found a new one _yesterday?_ ”

“Well, yeah, but whether or not you can find one depends on the total number of spells available.”

“Sure, but since we don’t run into them daily there _can’t_ be that many, or we’d be finding them by accident all the time. Weren’t we just talking about combinatorics the other day?”

She laughed “That’s true. But it’s not surprising no spells were found until someone went looking. When was the last time you thought about three random words of medium length, for several minutes, without interruption? Also somebody noticed that all the words in the spells have five or more letters.”

“So?”

“Shorter words tend to appear between longer words in sentences. Every phrase has a lot of noise in it, so spells aren’t likely to occur by accident. Even if you read the same line in a story three times, it’s unlikely there are any spells in there.”

“…I don’t know.” I was having a hard time accepting this. Why would magic care about random words? Why would it work with English? Why did you have to know the meaning of the words? I was about to suggest that we try casting the spells in French or something--a language we had found we shared--when Brianna cut me off.

“We need a better way of searching through the words, though. I wish I knew someone in the computer science department.”

What a coincidence, I thought. “Actually, I do know somebody.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, his name is Thad. He’s a friend from high school.”

“Maybe we should ask him for help? Although, I’m not sure if we should tell him about magic…” she said. She was rubbing her chin.

“Why not?”

“This is a pretty big deal. The more people who know about it, the less of an advantage we have in studying it.” She flipped a few more pages in the dictionary. “It’s obviously not hard to find new spells. If I discovered a spell, I might not tell anyone at all,depending on what it does. Introducing more people makes it less likely that I’ll make the critical discovery, right?”

“Why do we care about preserving our advantage?” I asked. “Magic is a huge deal. We want more people to know about it, so they can start innovating. I mean… just the walk faster spell has a lot of potential to do good, if it helps more people walk to work!”

“That’s a pretty lame example.”

“Yeah, well, it depends on what other spells there are. We could do a lot of good by discovering the spells sooner than later.” I looked at the dictionary in her hand. How many more spells might be hidden there? What would those spells do? “Imagine if there is a spell that reverses aging? Every second we delay is extremely costly, then.”

“The spells could also cause a lot of harm,” she said. “In fact, I think it’s more likely that bad things will result from this discovery than good things."

"Why?"

"Just because change tends to be disruptive.” She didn’t stop looking through the book.

“You have a point,” I said. “But if we’re going to ask Thad for help, we’ve got to tell him. If you lie to people you need help from, you’re hurting your cause more than helping it.”

“But this is _literal magic_. We need to take precautions.”

“You said there were ten other people on the forum already, or maybe more.”

“Ah--” she said, before laughing. “Good point. I guess that ship has already sailed.” I could see her resistance breaking down. It occurred to me that Brianna loved talking about surprising facts, and magic was the most surprising thing possible--maybe she had to work to convince herself to keep it secret in the first place.

“The truth is the best policy anyway.” I said. “Nevermind being convenient, it is morally imperative to tell Thad the truth. About the forum and all the rest of it.”

“It wouldn’t be lying if we left things out,” she said, a frown growing on her face.

“I think in this case, it is. His first question is going to be ‘Why?’ for the spell generator. If we mention magic, his second question will be ‘How?’.”

“Fair enough.”

“I don’t think he’ll believe us unless he tries it himself, but he’ll appreciate the problem before he can verify. And later, he’ll appreciate the honesty.”

“Yeah, you know what, you’re right. We’ll tell him what we’ve found. You should also tell him we want a program for searching through possible spells, in order, and to look at the examples on the internet and see if he notices any patterns.” She rubbed her chin. “With only five examples it might be really hard.”

“Why don’t we all meet for lunch tomorrow?”

“I’ve got to catch up on the homework I put off to learn _freaking magic_ ,” said Brianna before she laughed again. ”So perhaps another day. Do you mind contacting him for me?”

“Not at all.” 

\---

Two days had passed since I last saw Brianna. In that time, three new spells had been discovered. The most interesting one was named Voice Strengthening. It allowed you to shout extremely loud--loud enough to deafen yourself and others, if the discoverer wasn’t exaggerating on their post. Following Brianna’s advice, I hadn’t learned any other spells after the first.

Those who discovered spells revealed that one could tell if a combination of words was right in less than a minute. The words would start to mix together in your mind, much more rapidly than a random combination. The potential for a spell could be felt.

I considered introducing more people to magic to see if that was really true, but someone else had already done the experiment. A total stranger, after learning one spell, could tell the others from nonsense combinations.

That boded well for our endeavor. I went to meet Brianna with a light heart. We were at the campus cafeteria.

“Has Thad gotten back to you?” she asked.

“Yeah. In fact, he’s already learned his first spell, and wrote some code to search for more. He even made an account on the forum and shared his algorithm with them.”

“Nice! Although, algorithm…?” said Brianna, one eyebrow raised.

“Well, potential spell generator. He noticed what you said right away, that no words are shorter than five letters. But also that none are more than nine letters long, and all three words within a spell start with different letters, and that the words appear to be random otherwise in terms of dictionary placement and meaning.”

I took a bite of my sandwich. Thad had spent fifteen minutes complaining to me while trying not to pull out his hair--it was as though magic cared about spelling more than meaning, although it absolutely forced the human to know meaning before they could cast the spell.

“He’d also mentioned that the spells that are available formed a very suggestive set, which made him wonder if his conclusions were wrong. With small sample sizes you can be misled.”

“Misled?” she said, her voice rising.

“By your expectations, I mean.”

“Huh.”

“He didn’t have enough data to be confident in his algorithm, and even with it the search space is gigantic. It doesn’t narrow things down much at all.”

“It’s not nothing,” she said. “You know, if the owner of the site were smart, they’d try to coordinate with him for their spellsearch.” The website had started a systematic search for spells and was calling for volunteers, with everyone who discovered a spell promising to share it with rest.

“It’s funny you say that. He texted me that the Admin reached out to him today. They want to use his algorithm for just that.”

“See, that’s just efficient,” she said. “Do you think a lot of people will volunteer to search?”

“They seem to be so far. There are now thirty registered users.” She was nodding. “You seem happy about it. What about first-mover advantage?”

“I’m just happy things are progressing so smoothly. And I suppose the site owner will have the first mover advantage, even if _we_ don’t!” Her expression had gotten darker, but her smile suggested a joke.

“Is that why you haven’t made an account yet?”

“I mean…” she said. It was rare for Brianna to be at a loss for words. When she didn’t go on I continued.

“You have to jump in if you are going to be a part of this. Being on the forum isn’t just about telling what you know--it’s about forming connections to people who are studying magic. Like Thad made with the Admin, or the people who were searching for spells together. These are valuable connections, and wanting to keep your discoveries to yourself just means the group will shoot right past you.” She nodded as I spoke, as though she didn’t disagree with anything I was saying.

“I know you’re right. I’ve just been putting it off.”

“I made an account already.”

“I figured you must have. You were talking about it that way, and you aren’t the type to recommend an action you wouldn’t take yourself.”

“You’re right. Will you be making an account as well, then?”

“I suppose so.”

\---

Brianna made her account, but didn’t comment much. It seemed that the lurker mindset was still strong within her. I was beginning to see why she might not think she was cut out to be a politician or charismatic leader--she was more shy than I had guessed at first.

She also took to searching for spells with a monomaniacal passion. I never saw Brianna without a dictionary after that. She took notes in a notebook she carried.

The spell forum users began to struggle after the first eight. Still, the number of users continued to grow: first a hundred, then a thousand. The fact that the magic worked wasn’t going unnoticed. Finally a new spell was discovered: one for lifting change from the ground, that the forum named the Coin Retrieval spell.

“We could make it push a generator,” said Thad.

“I don’t know, it seems pretty weak.” We were in the living room of the house he rented with two others. Thad was a year older than me and a sophomore, so he was allowed to live off campus. 

“Maybe if we make the coins bigger, the force will be bigger. Here, let’s try it with washers instead.” Thad had washers and other hardware in his room. He was the kind of guy who liked to tinker.

It soon became apparent that the spell wouldn’t work on washers. Thad talked about filing down a coin to see what would happen. We put coins in envelopes to see if he could use it to figure out which had spare change in them, vs which had washers--but it also turned out that it wouldn’t lift a coin you couldn’t see.

We kept experimenting. Thad became increasingly frustrated.

“Why is looking through a mirror okay, but looking at a photo isn’t?” Thad stomped around. “Let me borrow your phone.”

“Okay,” I said as I handed it to him. He flipped it open and pointed its camera at the change we’d thrown to the floor. After a moment a penny rose to his outstretched hand.

“Videos are just freaking pictures delivered really fast!” he said. “Arrgggh, we need to find a way to make this freeze halfway through and see what happens.”

“I’ve got a class soon,” I said. He waved his hand.

“Get going, I’ll experiment without you, just as soon as I learn this spell.”

“Good luck.”

“I’m still pissed that you learn spells so much faster than I do,” he said.

“What can I say, I’m magically gifted.”

\---

About a week after that, the number of registered users exploded. Three additional spells were discovered over the next five days. That was when things really started picking up.

Magic made it onto the news.

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Brianna. “Why would you even think that was a good idea?”

“Nobody said that spell casters had to be smart,” I replied. We were watching a report on a television in the cafeteria.

It was about an attempted bank robbery. Someone had used the Coin Retrieval spell to try to pull money out of a cashier’s hand. Until I saw the report, I hadn’t thought to try it on paper bills. Apparently it could pick those up as well, though it wasn’t strong enough to yank one from a teller’s hands. The would-be robber had been arrested five minutes later.

“This is horrible news,” said Brianna.

“They seem to be taking it seriously. I’m surprised the newscaster can even believe the story. Perhaps magic is easier to accept than I thought.”

“But their first association for it is a _crime_?” she said. “We don’t want it to be associated with criminals!”

“I don’t think many people are going to miss the utility of magic for good.”

“But who is going to flock to the forum, now? What kind of community will it become?”

\---

Two hundred thousand people joined the Spelling Forum, flooding it with questions, suggestions, and speculations. People tried to come up with useful ways to use the spells discovered so far. Several areas of focus emerged--one group sought to show that the spells broke the laws of thermodynamics, another sought to integrate magic with technology, and a third tried to weaponize spells.

Many things were discovered. It was pointed out that the spells were a Turing test of sorts, and might be a resolution to the paradox of p-zombies. Only a _conscious mind_ meditating on the words could cast spells, after all--or that was the common assumption.

Somebody used the Walking Fast spell to rollerblade uphill at twenty miles per hour, a feat that caused injuries when imitated.

Someone else successfully used the Coin Retrieval spell to steal ten thousand dollars of casino chips in Los Vegas. They weren’t caught.

After that, whoever owned the forum deleted it.

\---

“I think we should stick to CrasherMagic,” said Thad. “It’s the biggest, probably already bigger than the Spelling Forum was. And it looks like they are running my algorithm already.”

“What do you think?” I asked Brianna. She had her head on the table--the loss of the first forum had hit her hard. When I imagined what it would be like for an introvert to open up to a community only to have it ripped away, I felt a need to cheer her up.

“We can make accounts, but I’m not sure we should participate in the search,” she said.

“Why not?”

“How do we know CrasherMagic isn’t a criminal enterprise?”

“How did we know that about the Spelling Forum?” Thad countered.

“It was before all the robberies,” said Brianna. She continued to rest her head in her hands. “And have you seen how many threads they have for using spells to hurt people?”

“It’s not like everybody on the forums is evil,” I said.

“Enough of them are, though! Somebody came up with using the Shouting Script for torture!”

“The what?” asked Thad.

Brianna sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Voice Strengthening is what I meant. I’ve been staying up too late--four sites is too many to follow.”

“That’s why we should pick _just one_ ,” said Thad.

“Regardless of which we choose, we’ll be worsening the problem.”

“Well if you want a more moral site, we could try the Spell Brigade,” I said. “Their motto is “Making the World Better with God’s Magic.” 

“No, those guys are even creepier than CrasherMagic.”

“We could make a forum on Reddit,” suggested Thad. “They started letting users make their own earlier this year. But then we’d have to get people to switch to Reddit.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Brianna.

“You’ve heard of it?”

“I have. Yeah, let’s do that.”

We did, but CrasherMagic remained the most popular. More and more people got involved in it, until it had more users than Reddit in its entirety. We had lost the first-mover advantage--if we’d ever had it--and were forced to participate on CrasherMagic or not at all.

\---

“I’m quitting school,” said Brianna.

“Because magic is more important?”

“Yeah. Did you see the post about the five-word spell?”

“What! I thought all spells had only three words?”

“Apparently not. Someone discovered a Strengthening spell.”

“What are the words?”

“... _Apogee cared creodont flange satiate._ ”

“Uh, are you sure? Two start with a C.”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Words in the same spell can start with the same letters. The implications are severe--both longer spells, and more of them. There are many more spells than we thought, so I’m going to start searching for them full time.”

“Are you going to look for longer or shorter ones?”

“Longer, of course. They always seem to be more powerful.”

"Always?"

"I meant already."

\---

Four months had passed since magic became real. The most recent news was of pirates in Somalia using a spell to make themselves bulletproof. Identity thieves in Europe had already been using a spell to change their appearance--not just how they looked, but how they _physically were--_ and doctors in China were exploring the limits of a healing spell that had been discovered. Magic was in the process of remaking the world in a dozen ways.

Brianna had big news, but she didn’t tell me what it was. She wanted to meet, so I was on the way to a coffee shop near campus. I held a light in front of me--a useful spell I’d gotten from CrasherMagic, before it had been shut down.

Forums dedicated to spellcasting were now illegal. It didn’t seem to be slowing things down that much--spells were shared all over the internet, posted on social media, and talked about all the time.

We would be drinking tea, rather than coffee. A revolution in Brazil had started a month prior, and the coffee shortage was starting to affect the shops near campus. Magic was involved somehow, but the news refused to name the spell other than noting that it was effective at killing.

I passed a man on the street. We were walking by each other when he stopped moving. I held my breath--it took several seconds to cast a spell, and I had no idea what he was thinking. Could he be about to attack me? When he walked again we gave each other a wide berth. He must have thought the same about me.

Brianna was already at the coffee shop.

“I learned of a new spell,” she said. Her hands were steady on a paper cup.

“For having discovered a spell, you don’t seem that excited.”

“I didn’t come up with this one, actually. Someone on the forum told me about it. Just in time for the shutdown, though I don’t think either of us would want to share it anyway. It is too powerful.”

“What spell is it?” She waved me forward and whispered in my ear.

“Teleportation.”

I choked, but I didn’t raise my voice. “Teleportation!” I hissed, “You have to show me!”

“I haven’t had a chance to learn it,” she said.

“What!” I said. She frowned.

“I’m trying, but I learned a lot of spells already. I think it’s going to take me a few days at least. And I think you should learn it first anyway.”

“Why?”

“Teleportation will be the most altruistically capable spell.”

“Uhh...”

“Think about it! You could teleport containers of food to the starving, for example.”

“Don’t we have bigger problems than that? And wouldn’t it be better to be able to conjure food, instead?”

“We can already do that!”

“There’s a spell?”

“No, that’s what _agriculture_ is. It’s conjuring food, much more than we could ever possibly eat. It’s just in the wrong place.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“We have had the resources to solve all kinds of problems for a long time--the hard part is just getting those resources to those who need them. You could take doctors to remote villages, or the sick to an expert who can help them. Heck, you could rescue people from burning buildings--or from internment camps! Teleportation is definitely the way to go.”

“I don’t know, I’m just one person. Also, wasn’t there a thing about local warlords seizing donations? I might be making the problem worse!” Or someone might see me teleport, and decide to take me hostage and demand the spell, I thought. Then I belatedly realized I could just teleport away--unless they somehow stopped me.

“Well, after you learn to teleport, you can teach others. Imagine going to an African village and teaching everyone there how to teleport. It would change everything.”

“Yeah… it would. But not in a good way. For example, If everyone learns to teleport, criminals could steal things and disappear. Or get arrested, and just teleport out of prison.” When I said it her expression fell.

“Until an anti-magic spell is discovered, or some other solution, that’s just going to be the problem with magic. Or maybe it won’t be an issue, because if people get what they need to survive, there’s no point to becoming a criminal.”

“Not all crimes are about survival,” I said. “Vandals and arsons are destructive for no reason.” The spell of Flame at Sight had proven it definitely. “Assault without robbery sometimes happens.”

She wore a deep frown. “That’s true. I still think it will be a net positive.”

“But once everyone can teleport, criminals are going to come out of the woodwork. How many more people will want to be arsonists or highwaymen, once they can escape punishment?”

“There won’t be highwaymen. There won’t be a highway.”

“Ah, true,” I said.

“Well, perhaps you won’t teach everyone. Perhaps you’ll only teach a few trusted people, or wait to teach anyone at all until we have ways of limiting it. The point is--now is the time for _first mover advantage_. You are the only one of three people who even _knows_ about the teleportation spell. If you learn it quickly, we’ll get to steer how the world uses it. For the better.”

“Hmm. I’ll think about it.”

I didn’t need to think about it much. The ability sounded awesome---just knowing that teleportation was possible was enough for me. She had written the words for me in the coffee shop, so I got started that same day.

\---

It took about four hours for me to learn. Not too bad, I thought, and the entire reason I kept my personal list of spells as short as possible. When it finally took effect my heart was pounding in excitement.

Then it wasn’t beating at all. The sensation of teleportation was unlike anything I’d experienced before.

The world went black and grey. I was disembodied; an astral projection of sorts, into a world of mostly shadow. Looking down I could see my black-and-white body in front and below me, sitting in the chair in my dorm room. It looked strangely crisp, but also indistinct, like cotton in a spotlight. I realized the room was no longer lit by the streetlight outside. Getting closer to my own head, I could see that my hair was translucent and shimmering, while my head beneath it was solid and dark. The colors inverted as I looked.

Density was what I perceived.

I could also feel where my ghostly body was, though I could not see it at all. I waved my invisible hand in front of my face. It was as though I was dragging it through water. When I pushed my hand into my desk it went in. That was like jamming it through a pile of sand. Reluctantly I put my hand into my physical body’s arm--it felt like there was nothing there at all.

Teleporting into my desk or my arm would be a bad idea. Instead I floated above my bed and released the spell. When I let go of the meditation there was a thumping sensation and I found my real body moved to where my apparition had been. Just a short fall later and I was in my bed.

I was still clothed, so it had automatically taken my clothes.

There had been only a slight popping sound. I realized that I had changed places with the air when I teleported. Fortunate, I thought, since my roommate was asleep in the same room and the vacuum collapsing might have broken our window with a thunderclap.

I had half-a-dozen experiments to try, and I was raring to go, but instead I tried to sleep.

It was two in the morning--I couldn’t stay up to experiment. My next cast would still take three or four hours. As was typical. The time to cast a spell would go down after every cast until it approached some minimum, but the first few were the worst. I hoped the minimum for teleportation was short indeed, because if it always took over an hour--might as well drive then.

Brianna texted me the next day and I gave her the good news. She recommended I keep practicing until I could teleport quickly. I decided to skip class and focus on it.

I found I could move my projection fast indeed--a hundred miles per hour or more at a time, though the buildup of speed took several subjective seconds. WIth Thad’s help and a high speed motor, we determined that time was still passing as I projected. Time was just a thousand times slower from my perspective. Now I just needed to get the cast time down.

Four days later all three of us agreed to meet up at the campus library. I had skipped every class in the meantime, but at least teleportation only took me five minutes. I didn’t think to ask if Brianna had finished learning the spell herself.

\---

Some days later, I was at Thad’s house. I’d gotten the teleportation time down to five seconds, and we were experimenting with its limitations. We’d learned, with the help of a cricket, that only inanimate things would accompany me if I tried to teleport them. Clothing was easy, a held pencil was harder.

I made a big mistake when I tried to teleport into a solid object. When I’d tried to put the tip of my finger in a rock, I’d lost the tip of it along with a piece of the glove I had been wearing. It was fortunate I’d made the initial test so small.

“What are you doing?” asked Thad.

“Texting Brianna. She probably knows the spell by now--I don’t want her to get hurt.”

“Hasn’t she been acting weird lately?” asked Thad. “For somebody who doesn go to school anymore, it’s hard to meet up with her.”

“She spends all day tracking the forums. Just in case a disastrous spell is learned.”

“Like what happened in Brazil,” Thad said.

“Yeah…” I said, my mood darkening. Someone in Brazil had learned a spell for stealing other people’s spells. There was one very powerful dictator setting himself up, forcing everyone else to give up magic. He was the second--the first that had tried was killed by a counter resistance. The news was calling the dictators Spell Lords.

There was a knock at the door. Thad went to answer it.

“Are you Thad Johnson?” said the man on the other side. He was tall, dressed in a suit, and holding a badge. Beside him was another man, slightly shorter and blonde.

“Yes, I’m Thad. Who are you?”

“I’m Agent Grieves, and this is Agent Imen. May we please come in?” Thad hesitated, so the man went on. “We have reason to suspect that your life is in danger.”

“Come in, then,” he said, his voice shaking. The men walked into the living room but didn’t sit down. I noticed they both had earpieces.

My blood pressure went up.

“Who are you?” Agent Grieves asked me. I told him, and he promptly ignored me.

“We need you to relocate,” Agent Imen said to Thad. “You’re the one who came up with the original spell-search algorithm, and set up the Spelling Forum?”

“You’re half right,” said Thad. “I came up with the algorithm. But the forum was someone else.”

“Records show your name as the site owner, and your name on the credit card used to pay for it.”

“What?” he said. “I don’t even have a credit card!”

“We can sort this out later,” said Agent Grieves. “We have reason to believe that a foreign team is on its way to extract you. In fact, they could be here any minute. We don’t have time for this, so--”

He paused, his finger on his earpiece. A moment later there was another knock at the door. Agent Grieves, to my shock, drew a pistol and walked toward it.

“It’s a young woman,” he said. “Someone you know?”

“Let me see,” said Thad. He looked through the peephole. “Yeah, that’s Brianna. We should let her in.”

Agent Grieves stood aside and Thad opened the door. Brianna walked in, her eyes widening at the sight of the Agents.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, as Agent Imen tried to ask something similar.

“I came to check on you guys, see how things were going. It doesn’t look like they are going well,” she said.

“No,” said Agent Grieves. “We were just telling your friends that they need to get out of here. It isn’t--”

At that moment, we heard gunfire.

\---

“We’re going out the back,” said Agent Imen. “Follow me. Grieves, you take up the rear.”

He walked through Thad’s house like he owned it. The agents remained stoic, while Brianna and especially Thad seemed terrified. I felt the same.

When Agent Imen opened the back door it was shredded by flying bullets.

“Not cautious, are they!” he shouted. “Get to the basement!” We turned and ran. Imen dived under a window that shattered. He started to return fire.

We scrambled down the stairs.

“Stay put,” said Grieves. “We’re going to have to force them to retreat. Then we’ll come get you, and take you somewhere safer.” He closed the door behind him and ran upstairs. Soon we heard his gun returning fire alongside Imen’s.

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” said Thad. He was sitting on the floor. Brianna stood beside him.

“Calm down,” she said, her face dark. “I think I can get us out of this.”

“We can get out of it,” I said. “But Thad hasn’t learned to teleport. And we should do as the Agents say.”

“They aren’t trustworthy either,” she said. “They’re probably here to interrogate you about the Spelling Forum.”

“Teleport away, then, but I’m staying with Thad.” She nodded.

“I haven’t actually learned to teleport, myself, but I have another spell. One that can turn a person into an object that can be teleported.”

“What!” said Thad.

“How do you even know that if you can’t teleport?” I said.

“There isn’t time to explain,” she said. “You’ve just got to trust me.”

“That still doesn’t let you escape. Only me and Thad,” I shouted. The gunfire was growing more intense.

“I’m deeply sorry,” she shouted back. “I have to do this.”

Brianna reached out and touched my arm. I felt an electric tingle. I realized that it was the first time she had ever touched me.

“What did you do?” She ignored my question.

“This won’t work unless you allow it to--you’ve got to remain calm and try not to fight it. Can you do that?”

Behind me, someone was pounding on the door. I heard Agent Grieves shout--it must have been him. He went silent and there was another burst of gunfire, which I heard tearing up the walls out in the hallway on the first floor. A piece of shrapnel flew and cut Brianna’s cheek, but she didn’t even flinch. Then there was a short response of return fire from nearby--Grieves must have dived behind something.

“I’ll try,” I said. She nodded.

Then Brianna put her hand on my forehead. My limbs began to feel heavy and weak. I fell to my knees, but the falling didn’t stop. I was shrinking. Brianna frowned with concentration. My vision started to pull in. The last thing I saw was the look of shock and fear on Thad’s face.

Then I thought nothing.

\---

My next experience was waking up in sunlight. I was sitting in the dirt, surrounded by trees with loose bark. I got to my feet. I had no idea whether seconds or years had passed. My thoughts were in disarray, at least for a moment. Then everything snapped back--the attack, our mortal danger from either side.

When I saw Brianna I realized only a short amount of time could have passed. She was wearing the same clothes I had just seen her in, and still had the same look of grim determination. The wound on her cheek was still bleeding.

“Wha--” I tried to say, but she shushed me.

“Let me bring Thad back first,” she said. Then she pulled a black marble from her pocket. I watched in moderately-terrified fascination as it began to grow, sprouting limbs in every direction. She dropped it--him--on the ground. The shifting mass frothed and expanded until Thad was laying on the forest floor in front of me. Brianna stood back for a moment and cast another spell on him. Then his eyes fluttered open. They stopped wandering after a moment and he sat up.

“It worked?” Thad said.

“Yes,” Brianna replied. She turned to me and went on; “I’m deeply sorry.”

“What, what happened?”

“I took your ability to teleport,” she said. “Then I turned both of you into inanimate objects, and teleported us away.”

“Wha---” I said. “I’m so confused. Spell stealing is brand new! How did you figure out the words for it? And what’s this about inanimate objects--is it another spell you discovered, and didn’t tell anyone?”

“No. This is going to be hard to explain,” she said as she sighed. She touched the rivulet of blood on her cheek, as though she’d just noticed it. The bleeding stopped. “I should have taken us to someplace with chairs. I just wanted somewhere without distractions--the longer you are inanimate, the worse it is for you. Your hair is probably going to fall out…” she winced. “Then again… maybe it’s good nobody else here. Nobody can learn my secret.”

“There are things you haven’t been telling us,” said Thad. “Many things. Are you going to come clean?”

“Yes. So that you can understand,” she said to Thad, “and so I might be able to atone,” she said to me. “I wanted to ask first, before I took teleportation from you. To explain everything, to see if you would still agree to give me your hard work.” She put a hand in her hair. “It’s all gone wrong.”

“What do you mean, ‘Would still agree?’”

“Like last time.”

“What do you _mean_?” She gave me an apologetic look. “Just, tell me.”

“I’m a time traveler.”

I sat back down.

\---

“In my timeline, magic wasn’t discovered until 2017,” said Brianna. “Just like here, someone posted about it online. Most people didn’t believe it at first, but when it’s easy to verify people _can_ change their minds.”

I was too numb with shock to consider all the implications. Some part of me noted that she was at least ten years older than she seemed--or perhaps ten years younger. She might have been college age in 2017. I didn’t think about it much as she continued to speak.

“Almost the same sequence of events happened in my world,” she went on. “People losing trust in identity. A wave of crime, followed by a rise in organized syndicates of Spell Lords. It didn’t happen quite as _fast_ as it did here, but it happened in almost the same way. Something similar happened during one timeline, in 2015. I guess having a single central forum where people systematically search for new spells causes it.”

“It was you,” said Thad, his face aghast. “You set up the forum. You--you pretended to be _me_ , so that if anyone came after you they’d get me first!”

“You’re right, but if it makes you feel better, you came up with the plan yourself in the timeline before this. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“How dare--”

“Do you want me to finish my explanation,” she said, her voice flat, “Or teleport away, and abandon this timeline right after that.” Thad shut his mouth into a tight line. “Can you recognize that this explanation is a generosity I don’t have to provide?”

He only glared at her. Thad might have been thinking of attacking her, but it was obvious to everyone that it was a bad idea. She had an unknown advantage over us--an unknown number of spells. After a moment I told her to go on.

“Things don’t stop with new dictators in Brazil. Spell Lords destroyed my society. There wasn’t a nuclear exchange, like you might expect--technicians started destroying the bombs before the Spell Lords could get them, and in the general collapse no-one could repair nuclear weapons, so they became unusable. There isn’t a spell as powerful as a nuke, as far as I know. Maybe my world’s continued existence was a matter of luck. I won’t say we got lucky, because we did not.

“The most successful warlords were those who got slaves to systematically search for new spells. You,” she said, pointing to me, “asked me, last time around, why slaves would reveal the existence of any spell they discovered. I told you about how the work was divided into sections that were done in duplicate, and about how slaves that discovered spells were rewarded while those that tried to hide them were tortured to death. You said it would be a moral imperative to hide spells despite those incentives, and I agreed. It’s not a system I want to explain in depth, because I was a part of it and it is more horrific than you can imagine.

“That was the state of humanity when I discovered the spell for time travel. It is twelve words long, so whatever the state of that world, _I_ am extremely lucky. I chose not to give it to my captors--instead I travelled back in time the maximum amount I could. I tried to use the spell to escape the situation.”

“How far…”

“I should note that I was a slave for six years. That meant I found the time travel spell sometime in 2025. The first time I _used_ the spell, it took twenty-four hours to cast, and it only took me back _one day_.” She shook her head. “When I woke up in the camp, with the same work in front of me, I almost gave up and turned it in. It seemed useless.

“But I didn’t give up. I cast it again, and kept casting it. I got faster. It started flinging me back to younger and younger versions of myself. One day of undone time became three, then five, then ten. I had a few close calls until I made it out of the camp--particularly since the spell doesn’t leave me in a good state when I arrive in the past--but by then it was taking me back weeks for each cast. Now it takes me back the maximum amount of time, every time.”

“Maximum?”

“It won’t take me earlier than September 4th, 2008. I think that’s the day magic first entered the world.” She shrugged. “If I hadn’t intervened in this timeline, we wouldn’t have discovered it for almost ten years.”

“Wait, so you are… forty years old?”

“It depends on what you mean. If you mean the time I’ve consciously experienced, I’m at least ninety. I’m not entirely sure, I didn’t have a calendar when I was enslaved and I didn’t keep track of the date until I had gone before 2017. But if you mean the physiological age of the body I took over by time travelling--I’m eight.”

I put a hand to my forehead. “You used the spell for altering yourself before I even met you.”

“I did.”

“Did you have to make yourself so beautiful?”

She looked at me like it was a stupid question--which was fair, because it was. She shrugged. “I may be prettier than I would have been at eighteen. It makes people listen to you.” Her eyes flashed. “At least if you strike a perfect balance between objectification and disregard. Too pretty and you are viewed as inanimate. Too ugly and you end up treated as irrelevant, instead.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Thad said. “You can’t just put your ninety-year-old mind into the body of an eight year old. An eight-year-old’s brain isn’t finished developing--your old brain might not even fit in your head! And what about nerves? Muscle memory? You wouldn’t be the same person at all.”

Brianna’s face had a look of deadly seriousness to it. “I know. The process does its best, but it obviously isn’t perfect. Time travel usually knocks me unconscious, and I wake up with blood all over my face and a headache that hurts so bad I doubt you can even imagine it. The first thing I do is alter myself to have an adult body. Then I heal myself. Then--”

“With another spell that you’ve kept hidden.”

“Yes, the spell for healing. Though I know someone else in this world has also discovered it.”

“How many people have died while you kept that secret?” I said, as I felt my anger blossoming for the first time. She winced.

“Too many. I hope you can see why I thought it was necessary, and I plan to make up for it.” She pulled her notebook out of her pocket. “I was trying to say that the healing spell doesn’t restore memories I lose when I revert. Time travel is far from painless.”

“Have you considered that it’s the time travel spell, and not the magic, that doesn’t let you go further back in time?” Thad’s anger seemed to be cooling.

“I have. I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, not without letting someone else take the spell for time travel. I do know that I’m the only spellcaster on Earth, when I go back in time to September 4th.”

“How do you know?”

“There is a spell for detecting when other people use spells,” she said. “It only works on one type of spell each time you cast it, but it gives you a sense of when someone last used the spell you are checking, and where. A four-dimensional distance is felt between you and the last cast. It doesn’t give you a direction. However, if the spell you are detecting has never been cast, you can tell because the detection spell always fails.”

“Sounds useful,” I said, half-sarcastic.

“I use it almost constantly, and the warlords did as well.”

“What?”

“They used it to detect rebellions. I used it to know someone with a strengthening spell could be at Thad’s house.”

“Ah.”

“I also use it to be aware of it when anyone besides me has discovered the time travel spell. If someone else uses that one even once, it’s my cue to reset. I've detected someone else discovering it--twice.”

“Because you can’t let things get out of your control,” I said.

“If I do, the Earth will be overrun with Spell Lords. I shudder to think how powerful one could become by using time travel.” She did shudder as she said it.

“Isn’t that what you are doing, _right now?_ ” said Thad.

“No. I’m seeking a way to destroy magic, so that what I experienced never has to come to pass. In fact, that touches on what comes next.” She turned to me. “I am deeply sorry I took your ability to teleport without your consent. I cannot give it back to you, because nobody can be allowed to use the spell for stealing spells on _me_. But I promise you, I wasn’t planning on taking it without your permission.” She looked into my eyes. “Both times I explained this in the past, you’ve still agreed to give me a new spell. Willingly. And I have a gift.” She held out the notebook that she was holding.

“What’s this?”

“This is every spell I found useful except for the spell for time travel. I have included notes on how to use each, and what the best order for learning them is. With this and careful thought you can become the strongest person on the planet. You might even be able to stop the other Spell Lords from taking over. I’m not going to stay and find out.”

“It’s in French?”

“Yes. I didn’t want Thad to learn ahead of you,” she said, glancing over at him. “You are the more moral of the two, and the only person I’d trust with this.”

“Why are you even bothering,” said Thad, his voice despondent. “When you go back in time we won’t exist anymore.”

“I don’t know that for sure,” said Brianna.

“Oh come on. If the timeline continued without you, you’d be seeing a heck of a lot more time travellers than two per…” he waved his hand “...however many times you’ve reset. Admit it. You are killing the entire planet every time you use that spell.”

“I’ve thought about it more than you have,” she said, before turning back to me. “It’s possible that you succeed in destroying magic, or at least at preventing time travel. With teleportation and detection spells, and a large group of people, it may just be possible. I believe in your chances enough to have spent most of my time here rushing to complete this book.”

I didn’t know what to say. It hurt immensely, to know that Brianna had been hiding things from me from the moment I had met her--but she also seemed to place an immense trust in me. I was starting to believe her when she said that I’d have given her a spell willingly, in a previous timeline. I would want to help her, if she wanted to help everyone on Earth.

The book of spells that might end up making no difference was also very convincing. I wondered if it was designed to be so.

“Why did you manipulate me? Why didn’t you just learn to teleport by yourself?” I asked.

“I know one hundred and forty six spells,” she said. “The spell for stealing spells was only my fifth, but it does get harder to learn new ones as you go. It would take me a hundred thousand hours or more to learn a new spell at this point. Resetting the timeline also resets my learning. I can either steal new spells, or waste the rest of a natural lifespan trying to learn a single one while risking that someone else discovers time travel in the meantime.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s okay to manipulate me!”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. I’m deeply sorry. This timeline went much, much faster than they usually do. I should not have made that forum,” she said. Tears were coming to her eyes. “I should not have tried to trick people into finding more spells. I should have put it off. You--” she said, pointing at Thad, “--you suggested that I change the culture of the internet to make communication with words less frequent. Make images and emojis more popular, and delay the accident that discovers magic. Perhaps next time I will do that instead.”

“What happens to us, then?” Thad’s anger had turned to despair.

“I leave you, and you do your best without me.”

“Or cease to exist,” he said.

“You will still exist in the timeline I go to,” she said. “I’ll try to treat you better there.”

I felt a hand snake around my neck. A gun was put at my temple. “Nobody is going anywhere,” said Agent Grieves.

\---

“That was a very interesting story. I’d love it if you could tell me more.”

Brianna looked at him and me, her face a mixture of fury and horror. “Why would I?”

“I don’t want to stop you,” said Grieves. “You can go after my questions, and reset the timeline. I just want to know.”

“I don’t care what you want.”

“I’m trying to compromise here. If you prefer, I won’t report any of this to the higher ups.”

“Of course not,” said Brianna. “You already have the tracking spell and the teleportation spell. You plan on becoming a Spell Lord yourself.”

“Not teleporting. Flying and super speed, and tracking of course,” he said. “But I don’t want to be a Spell Lord. Our goal is the same, Brianna. A world where magic doesn’t destroy everything.”

“You know, I’ve met you guys before. A different timeline, a different person.”

“Oh?”

“It was the same asinine behavior, but her name was Agent Thrush.”

Grieves chuckled after a moment. “I can guess who that is. Lowery is very promising, for a junior Agent.”

“She was your successor, after a Spell Lord killed you and most of your team.”

“I’m still alive today,” he said. “Maybe if things go right, we’ll all be able to say that tomorrow.”

“You can’t threaten me,” she said. “I’m bulletproof, strong, self-healing, and I can also fly and move with super speed.”

“I didn’t see you re-up any of those.”

“I’ve gotten _very_ practiced at those in particular.” Her face betrayed a bit of nervousness.

“I’m inclined to put you to the test.”

“You have to know you’ll lose if it comes to a fight.”

“Not before I kill your savior,” he said, nudging me with the gun. “And why fight over a few questions? I just want to know the specifics of the other timelines. Where did you get most of those spells, Brianna? This guy here could only have given you one or two, by your own statement. What about the rest?”

She said nothing.

“At least give me the time travel spell. If you take off before any of us learn it, it doesn’t matter how the timelines behave. We won’t be bothering you, because if we use it we will be returning to a different past.”

“I won’t.”

“You realize we’ll find it eventually? Even if you don’t say a word, even if _everyone_ here dies.” He began to choke me. My hands helplessly went to pull against his arm, but he was far stronger than a human without magic. “I don’t want anyone to die, but I guess that’s the difference between us. Please, just tell me the spell.”

“Okay. Unhand him first.” To my incredulity, I felt the arm around my neck loosen. Agent Grieves stood up behind me. The gun was at the back of my head. “Put that down,” she said.

“Which? Actually, it doesn’t matter. I’m keeping both.” I realized he was holding the book that Brianna had given me. “I think at this point it’s actually better if you leave. I have backup on the way, and if you stay you might not get to reset after all. Alternatively, tell me the time travel spell and I’ll let him go with you. Either way, I’m keeping the book.”

Brianna looked at me, and I recognized something in her face. A painful decision being made. 

As fast as she could think, the book next to my head burst into flame.

Before a gun could fire, before the two other agents could land beside her, before I could say even a word: Brianna disappeared.

“Oh well,” said Agent Grieves. “I’d better keep up my end of the bargain.”

\---

I was walking in the park. To me, it seemed like the air itself was waiting in anticipation for a bright future. I felt anticipation myself--I had been far too early for class, so I was killing time.

As I walked under a tree I heard someone crying. It was a little girl. She was sitting against the trunk. Instantly I went into ‘help’ mode--a child crying causes that reflex more than any other thing, or at least I think so. I’m a particularly altruistic person, so it would be particularly hard for me to avoid stopping to see what was wrong. I imagined a child’s problems--a bully, or a small injury, or perhaps being lost and wanting her parents.

“Are you alright,” I said as gently as I could. I squatted to get down to her height. The little girl looked up, and I saw that her shirt was covered in blood. From ‘helping a child’ mode, I went into ‘emergency’ mode. She stood and was taller than me for a moment.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice high-pitched and uncertain. She wiped blood-ridden mucus from her nose. “I need a minute.”

“Just--just sit down. We’ll make sure you are okay.” I pulled out my phone to call 911. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said.

“Not if I don’t do it,” she said. Then the girl sprinted straight away from me. She was much faster than I had expected.

For a moment I hesitated. What would happen if I chased a little girl covered in blood, instead of going to class? How would it look? My morning had been easy until then.

Then my better instincts kicked in. “Wait,” I shouted, though she was already far enough away that she might not hear me. I dialed on my phone as I ran after her. My reputation, getting to class, having a simple morning--those things didn’t matter.

Someone needed help.


End file.
